# When Magic Remembers
## Chapter 2: The Road to Learning
*Three days later*
Harry had thought he understood what medieval travel would be like. After all, he'd read enough history books, seen enough films about knights and castles. But those sanitized portrayals had failed to capture the sheer physical misery of walking twenty miles a day on roads that were little more than muddy tracks through the wilderness.
His feet were blistered despite the well-made boots someone—he still wasn't entirely sure who—had provided with his medieval clothing. His shoulders ached from the weight of the travel pack Aelfric had assembled for him, filled with what the older wizard deemed essential supplies for the journey north. And despite the warming charms Aelfric renewed each morning, the October chill seemed to seep into his bones with every step.
"You walk like a man accustomed to easier travel," Aelfric observed, not unkindly, as they crested another in an endless series of hills. "Were roads better maintained in your homeland?"
Harry considered how to answer that. The truth—that he was used to Apparition, Floo powder, and the occasional Knight Bus ride—would only raise more questions he couldn't answer. "Something like that," he said finally. "We had… different methods of getting from place to place."
"Ah, a seafaring people perhaps? Or mountain folk with hardy ponies?" Aelfric's eyes twinkled with curiosity, but he didn't press when Harry remained silent. It was one of the things Harry was coming to appreciate about the older wizard—his willingness to let mysteries remain mysterious, at least for now.
They were following what Aelfric called the Old Road, though it bore little resemblance to any road Harry had ever seen. Mostly it was just a track worn by countless feet over generations, winding through forests and across moors with no regard for efficiency or ease of travel. Sometimes it broadened into something approaching a proper path, especially near villages or river crossings. More often it narrowed to a deer trail that required them to walk single file through dense underbrush.
But it was the countryside itself that truly drove home how far back in time Harry had traveled. This was England before deforestation, before industrialization, before the population growth that would eventually require every arable acre to be brought under cultivation. Ancient forests stretched for miles without break, broken only by the occasional clearing around a village or the meandering course of a river. The trees were enormous—oaks that must have been centuries old even now, their trunks so broad that three men couldn't link arms around them.
And everywhere, there was magic.
Not the hidden, secretive magic of Harry's time, but something open and integrated into daily life. They passed shrines at crossroads where offerings of bread and ale had been left for the forest spirits. They saw farmers using simple charms to encourage their crops and ward off pests. They met a wise woman traveling the opposite direction who spoke casually of brewing healing potions and reading omens in the flight of birds.
"It's so different," Harry murmured on their second day, watching a village smith work iron with spells as much as hammer and anvil. "Magic and ordinary life, I mean. Where I come from, they're kept much more separate."
Aelfric frowned at that. "Separate? How can they be separate? A man who works iron must know the songs that calm the metal's spirit. A woman who tends the sick must understand which herbs carry healing virtue and which carry harm. How does anyone accomplish anything of worth without magic?"
"They… find other ways," Harry said carefully. "Different tools, different methods."
"How curious. That sounds terribly inefficient." Aelfric was quiet for a long moment, then added, "Perhaps that explains the strangeness I sense about you, Harry of Potter's Field. You carry yourself like a man of power, yet you seem constantly surprised by the most ordinary workings. As if you've learned magic but never learned to live with it."
The observation was uncomfortably perceptive. Harry had indeed learned magic—years of it at Hogwarts, more in his Auror training—but it had always been kept carefully separate from the mundane world. The Statute of Secrecy had made sure of that. Here, there was no such separation. Magic was simply another tool, like a hammer or a plow, to be used by those who had the gift and accepted as natural by those who didn't.
It made him wonder what his world had lost when wizards went into hiding.
On their third morning, they encountered their first real danger.
They had stopped to water their ponies—Aelfric had purchased the sturdy little animals in the last village, declaring that they had too far to go to manage it all on foot—at a stream that crossed the road. Harry was refilling their water skins when he heard Aelfric's sharp intake of breath.
"We have company," the older wizard said quietly, his hand moving to his staff. "And they don't feel friendly."
Harry straightened slowly, his own hand drifting toward his wand. He could sense it now too—the prickle of hostile magic approaching from the forest on either side of the road. Multiple sources, all of them carrying the taint of dark intent.
"Bandits?" he asked.
"Worse." Aelfric's voice was grim. "These ones reek of shadow magic. The kind that twists a man's nature until there's nothing human left in him."
They emerged from the trees like something out of a nightmare. Five men—or things that had once been men—dressed in rotting leather and rusted mail. Their skin was gray and mottled, their eyes black pits that reflected no light. Most disturbing of all, they moved with unnatural coordination, as if controlled by a single will.
"Thralls," Aelfric breathed. "I'd hoped the stories were exaggerated."
Harry didn't recognize the term, but he could guess at the meaning. These were people who had been magically enslaved, their minds and souls bent to serve another's will. He'd seen similar magic during the war—Imperius curses and worse—but never anything this thorough, this complete.
The thralls spread out in a semicircle, cutting off any retreat back down the road. They carried weapons—crude swords and hunting spears—but Harry could sense that their real danger lay in the dark magic that animated them. They radiated malevolence like heat from a forge.
"Can they be saved?" Harry asked, though he suspected he already knew the answer.
"Not these ones," Aelfric replied sadly. "The corruption has gone too deep. They're hollow now, nothing left but hunger and hate. We must end their suffering."
The lead thrall opened its mouth and spoke, though the voice that emerged was not its own. It was deeper, older, carrying an authority that made the air itself seem to chill.
"Turn back, travelers. The road north is closed to those who would meddle in powers beyond their understanding."
"Powers beyond our understanding?" Aelfric stepped forward, his staff beginning to glow with warm golden light. "I am Aelfric the Learned, student of Merlin's arts and keeper of the old wisdom. I understand more than you think, servant of shadow."
The thrall's lips twisted in what might have been a smile. "Aelfric the Learned. Yes, we know of you. You and your kind think to build something new in the north, something that will stand against the darkness. But you are too late. The Foul One has already begun his great work. Soon all will serve, all will kneel, all will know the peace of absolute surrender."
"The Foul One," Harry repeated, his blood running cold. "Herpo?"
All five thralls turned their dead eyes toward him, and Harry felt the weight of an alien intelligence studying him through their gaze. When the lead thrall spoke again, there was something like curiosity in that hollow voice.
"Interesting. This one knows the Master's name, yet carries no taint of shadow. Who are you, stranger? Your magic feels… different. Older in some ways, yet touched by innovations we do not recognize."
Harry forced himself to meet those black eyes, even as every instinct screamed at him to run. "I'm no one of importance. Just a traveler seeking to learn."
"No one of importance," the thrall repeated, and this time there was definitely amusement in its tone. "Perhaps. Or perhaps you are something else entirely. No matter. You will serve, in the end. They all do."
The attack came without warning. All five thralls moved at once, faster than any human could manage, their weapons wreathed in shadow-fire that hissed and crackled as it cut through the air.
Harry's wand was in his hand before conscious thought, muscle memory from years of combat taking over. "Protego!" The shielding charm sprang up just in time to deflect a sword thrust that would have taken his head off. But the shadow-fire ate at his shield, corroding it like acid on metal.
Beside him, Aelfric was chanting in what sounded like Old English, his staff weaving patterns in the air that left trails of golden light. Where that light touched the thralls, they recoiled as if burned, but they didn't stop their advance.
"Their flesh is corrupt," Aelfric called out between incantations, "but the spirits that animate them are bound by ancient laws. We must—"
He broke off as another thrall flanked him, forcing him to spin his staff in a wide arc that sent the creature stumbling backward. But already the others were pressing closer, their coordination perfect, their movements inhuman.
Harry tried a Stunning Spell, but it passed through the nearest thrall without effect. Apparently whatever dark magic animated them also made them immune to conventional offensive spells. He switched tactics, conjuring a wall of flame between himself and his attackers.
The thralls walked through it without slowing down.
"Corporeal magic won't work!" Harry shouted, dodging a spear thrust that left shadow-fire burning in the air where his head had been. "They're not entirely physical anymore!"
"Then we must attack the binding itself!" Aelfric replied, his staff now blazing like a miniature sun. "The magic that holds them—break that, and they'll be free to die properly!"
Easier said than done. Harry could sense the bonds that held the thralls together, dark threads of magic that connected them to some distant controller. But disrupting that kind of work required precise application of force, and it was hard to be precise when five zombie-like creatures were trying to kill you.
One of the thralls got past his defenses, its sword sliding between his ribs with cold precision. Harry gasped, feeling the shadow-fire spread through his body like ice water in his veins. But instead of weakening him, the contact seemed to trigger something in his magic. Power flared along his skin, raw and wild and nothing like the controlled spellwork he was used to.
The thrall attacking him screamed—the first sound any of them had made that seemed truly their own—and crumbled to ash.
Harry stared at his hands in shock. That hadn't been any spell he knew. It had felt almost like accidental magic, the kind of wild power that manifested in wizarding children before they learned control. But more focused, more purposeful.
"Harry!" Aelfric's warning came just in time. Harry spun and caught another thrall's sword on his wand, the holly wood ringing like metal as it deflected the blow. The contact sent another surge of that strange power through him, and this thrall too dissolved into nothing.
The remaining three hesitated, and for the first time Harry saw something like uncertainty in their movements. Whatever was controlling them was clearly confused by what had just happened.
Harry pressed his advantage, reaching out with senses he hadn't known he possessed. There—the binding threads, dark and twisted but suddenly visible to him like physical objects. He grabbed them, not with his hands but with his magic, and pulled.
The threads snapped like overstretched rope.
All three remaining thralls collapsed at once, their bodies finally allowed to embrace the death that had been denied them. In the sudden silence, Harry could hear birds singing in the distance and the gentle babble of the stream they'd been trying to reach.
"Remarkable," Aelfric said softly, staring at the scattered ash that was all that remained of their attackers. "I've never seen magic work quite like that. Where did you learn to sever binding spells with raw power?"
"I… I don't think I did learn it," Harry admitted, still staring at his hands. "It just happened. Like the magic knew what needed to be done."
Aelfric's expression grew thoughtful. "Magic responding to need rather than conscious direction. That's… very old power, Harry. The kind that existed before we learned to cage it in words and gestures." He paused, studying Harry with new intensity. "What manner of place did you come from, to carry such abilities and yet seem so unfamiliar with their use?"
It was a fair question, and one Harry couldn't answer honestly. "A place very different from this one," he said finally. "Where magic was… more constrained."
"Constrained how?"
Harry thought of the Ministry of Magic, with its departments and regulations and careful monitoring of every spell cast. Of the Trace on underage wizards, preventing them from using magic outside of school. Of the elaborate concealment charms that hid the magical world from Muggle eyes.
"By fear," he said at last. "Fear of what would happen if it ran free."
Aelfric was quiet for a long moment, then nodded slowly. "Perhaps that explains the strangeness I sense about you. Magic constrained by fear would indeed produce different results than magic embraced as a natural part of life." He shouldered his pack again, then paused. "But consider this, Harry of Potter's Field—the power you just displayed suggests that your magic, at least, has not forgotten how to run free. The question is what you'll choose to do with that knowledge."
They remounted their ponies and continued north, but Harry found his thoughts returning again and again to what had happened during the fight. That surge of raw power, the way his magic had seemed to act independently of his conscious will—it reminded him of the strange things that had happened when he was a child, before he'd known he was a wizard. Accidental magic, they'd called it at Hogwarts, as if it were something to be grown out of rather than understood.
But what if they'd been wrong? What if accidental magic wasn't a sign of lack of control, but rather a glimpse of what magic could be when it wasn't bound by the rigid structures of formal spellwork?
"Aelfric," he said as they crested another hill, "you said the power I used was old. How old?"
"As old as magic itself, I'd guess. Before the Romans, before the Greeks, before any of the civilizations that tried to systematize and categorize the arts. In the early days, magic was simply the will of a gifted person made manifest in the world. No incantations, no wand movements, just pure intent given form."
"What changed?"
Aelfric was quiet for so long that Harry thought he might not answer. When he finally spoke, his voice was troubled. "Safety, mostly. Raw magic is powerful, but it's also dangerous. A wizard working with pure will can accomplish things that would take hours with formal spells—but if his emotions run away with him, he can also level a village by accident. The structured approach, the use of focus objects and specific incantations, it provides… stability."
"But at a cost."
"Everything has a cost," Aelfric agreed. "The question is whether what we gain is worth what we lose. And I fear that's a question each wizard must answer for himself."
They traveled in companionable silence after that, each lost in his own thoughts. The countryside gradually began to change as they moved north—the forests grew denser, the villages smaller and more scattered. The road itself became less defined, branching into multiple tracks that wandered off in different directions with no clear indication of which was the main route.
It was on their fourth day that they first saw Hogwarts.
They had climbed steadily all morning, following a path that wound up into the Scottish highlands. The landscape here was wild and beautiful—rolling hills covered in heather, ancient forests of pine and oak, streams that tumbled down rocky slopes in series of waterfalls and pools. It felt ancient in a way that even the English countryside hadn't, as if this land had never known the touch of human habitation.
Then they topped a ridge, and suddenly the castle was spread out before them in the valley below.
It wasn't the Hogwarts Harry knew. The familiar towers and turrets were there, but they looked raw and new, their stones still white with fresh cutting. The Great Hall was a massive timber structure, more like a Saxon mead-hall than the soaring stone cathedral he remembered. The grounds were mud and construction debris rather than manicured lawns. Everywhere he looked, he could see workers—both human and magical—hauling stone and timber, directing the placement of massive blocks with careful applications of levitation charms.
But despite the chaos of construction, despite the obvious signs that this was a building site rather than a finished school, there was something unmistakably magical about the place. The very air seemed to shimmer with power, and Harry could sense layer upon layer of protective enchantments being woven into the fabric of the structure.
"Magnificent, isn't it?" Aelfric said softly. "They say it will be the greatest magical stronghold ever built when it's finished. A place where learning can flourish in perfect safety."
Harry nodded, not trusting his voice. This was Hogwarts—his home, his refuge, the place where he'd first learned what it meant to belong somewhere. But it was also utterly foreign, a crude construction site that bore only the faintest resemblance to the castle he'd known.
Yet somehow, seeing it like this made it more real, not less. This wasn't the mythical Hogwarts of legend, founded by four perfect heroes who worked in harmony to create something eternal. This was the work of real people, struggling with real problems, making compromises and mistakes and doing their best with limited resources.
It was, in other words, human.
"Come," Aelfric said, urging his pony forward. "Let's see if they have room for two more teachers."
As they descended into the valley, Harry found himself thinking about the thralls they'd fought, and the voice that had spoken through them. *The Foul One has already begun his great work.* If that was true, if Herpo was indeed building some kind of army in the north, then this half-finished castle and its collection of scholars and builders were all that stood in his way.
It didn't seem like nearly enough.
But then Harry remembered the surge of power he'd felt during the fight, the way his magic had reached out and simply *known* what needed to be done. Maybe formal training and careful preparation weren't the only weapons available to them. Maybe sometimes the old ways, the wild ways, were exactly what was needed.
The thought should have worried him. Instead, as they approached the gates of the still-unfinished Hogwarts, Harry found himself almost eager to find out what other surprises his displaced magic might hold.
After all, he had a war to help win and a school to help build. And if his experience with accidental magic was any guide, things were about to get very interesting indeed.
The gates of Hogwarts stood open, but they were guarded. Two figures in simple brown robes flanked the entrance, both carrying staffs that gleamed with protective enchantments. As Harry and Aelfric approached, one of them stepped forward.
"Hold and state your business," the guard said, though his tone was more curious than hostile. "The castle is not yet ready to receive students."
"I am Aelfric the Learned," Aelfric replied with a formal bow. "I sent word ahead requesting an audience with the founders. This is my companion, Harry of Potter's Field, a scholar seeking to contribute to your great work."
The guard's expression shifted to one of recognition. "Aelfric the Learned! You're expected, sir. Lady Hufflepuff mentioned you specifically in yesterday's planning session." He turned to Harry, studying him with obvious curiosity. "And you, young master? What manner of learning do you bring to Hogwarts?"
Harry felt the weight of the moment settle on his shoulders. This was it—his chance to become part of Hogwarts from its very beginning, to help shape the institution that would train thousands of young wizards over the coming centuries. What he said here, how he presented himself, could change the course of magical history.
"I study the older arts," he said carefully, thinking of the power he'd displayed against the thralls. "Magic as it existed before we learned to bind it with words and ritual. I hope to understand how that ancient knowledge might serve the founders' vision."
The guard's eyebrows rose. "Old magic, is it? Well, that's certainly something we could use more understanding of. Half the protective wards we're trying to establish require techniques that haven't been used in generations." He stepped aside, gesturing them through the gates. "Welcome to Hogwarts, both of you. May your stay here be both long and fruitful."
As they passed through the gates and into the courtyard beyond, Harry felt a strange sense of coming home and leaving home simultaneously. This was Hogwarts, but not his Hogwarts. These were the founders, but not the legends he'd grown up hearing about.
Everything was different. Everything was the same.
And somewhere in the distance, he could hear the sound of hammers on stone as the future took shape, one careful blow at a time.
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*Author's Note: Chapter 2 establishes several key elements for our story: Harry's growing understanding of this medieval magical world, the introduction of the external threat (Herpo the Foul's thralls), and Harry's discovery that his magic works differently here—more primitively but also more powerfully. We've also reached Hogwarts itself, setting up the next phase of the story where Harry will meet the founders and begin to integrate into their community.*
*The thrall encounter serves multiple purposes: it shows the real danger posed by the larger conflict, demonstrates Harry's unique magical abilities, and gives us insight into how magic worked in this time period compared to Harry's more regulated magical education.*
*Next chapter: "The Founders Four" - Harry meets Godric, Helga, Rowena, and Salazar for the first time, and begins to understand the personalities behind the legends.*